About Me

Kristin Bricker is a freelance journalist and translator. She specializes in militarization, social movements, and the drug war in Latin America.

Kristin is a contributor to the CIP Americas Program. She previously served as the Security Sector Reform Resource Centre's Latin America blogger. Her work has appeared in NACLA, the Huffington Post, IPS, Foreign Policy in Focus, Counterpunch, Telesur, Rebelión, Left Turn, The Indypendent, Upside Down World, Por Esto!, The Guatemala Times, and The News (Mexico). Kristin has appeared on Al-Jazeera, Democracy Now!, Radio Mundo (Venezuela), Morning Report (New Zealand), Radio Bemba (Mexico) and various Pacifica radio programs. Her work has been cited in the Los Angeles Times, Proceso, and the Congressional Research Service's Report for Congress.

Kristin contributed a chapter about Mexico's peace movement to Global Fire, Local Sparks, published by the Indypendent.

BlogCatalog

Saturday, July 31, 2010

Police Raid Belies Government Excuses About Why It Refused to Break the Months-Long Paramilitary Blockade

by Kristin Bricker

UPDATE 8/3/2010: Women from the autonomous municipality who live in San Juan Copala held a press conference today. They gave updates on the two women who were injured when UBISORT shot them during the police/paramilitary raid. Seventeen-year-old Selena Ramírez López was shot in the lung and is in critical condition. Her 15-year-old sister Adela is also in critical condition; the bullet that struck her damaged her intestines and imbedded itself in her backbone. Adela might not ever regain her ability to walk.

Triquis from San Juan Copala protest in front of government
office, demand that paramilitaries leave their community.
(photo: Francisco Olvera/La Jornada)

At approximately 12:15 pm on July 30, over one hundred Oaxaca state police raided the autonomous municipality of San Juan Copala. Approximately thirty heavily armed members of the Union for the Social Well-being of the Triqui Region (UBISORT, a paramilitary organization) accompanied the police on the raid. Rufino Juárez, UBISORT's leader, reportedly participated in the raid.

The goal of the raid, according to the state government, was to remove the body of Anastasio Juárez Hernández from his home in San Juan Copala. Police did remove the dead man from his home and then left San Juan Copala. However, the paramilitaries, taking advantage of the police presence, took over San Juan Copala's town hall. The town hall is now occupied by thirty UBISORT paramilitaries armed with automatic assault rifles. "They have taken over control of the entire town," reports a source close to the autonomous authorities.

Meanwhile, the Mexican military has deployed soldiers to La Sabana, a nearby town that is controled by UBISORT. Thus far the soldiers have not entered San Juan Copala.

Two young indigenous Triqui women were wounded when the paramilitaries and police entered San Juan Copala. The women were part of a human blockade at the entrance to the town that attempted to impede the police and paramilitaries' access. The two women, ages 15 and 18, were "gravely wounded" when paramilitaries from UBISORT shot them as they entered San Juan Copala. The women were evacuated and are being treated at an undisclosed location.

Local press immediately parroted the government's claims that Juárez Hernández, who was UBISORT leader Rufino Juárez's brother and the government-recognized "municipal agent" of San Juan Copala, was murdered in his home in San Juan Copala. Juárez Hernández was not elected to the position of municipal agent; UBISORT appointed him to that position this past November.

Regardless of how or where Juárez Hernández died, the consequences of his murder are painfully apparent for San Juan Copala's residents. Their town is occupied by heavily armed paramilitaries who were escorted in by state police. To add insult to injury, the raid comes after seven months of a paramilitary blockade that the government has claimed it is incapable of breaking despite the autonomous municipality's claims that residents may starve to death if the blockade continues. The raid's irony wasn't lost on the Oaxaca-based Bartolomé Carrasco Briseño Human Rights Center, who wrote in a press release:

"It is inconsistent and paradoxical that when security measures were requested so that the 'Bety and Jiry' Humanitarian Caravan could enter [San Juan Copala] and leave food supplies, the State did not fulfill its responsibility and prevented the Caravan from fulfilling its mission. At that time, [the state] put together an impressive operation that was headed by the State Attorney General, the State Security Commissioner, and the President of the Oaxaca Human Rights Commission, which impeded the caravan's passage. They argued that conditions did not permit a safe entrance, and that not even the police could enter that territory. But in reality, they were just protecting the armed group named UBISORT.

"Now it is absurd that the authorities could put together an entire operation in order to carry out the initial investigation of the homicide, and that now they can enter [San Juan Copala] and on top of that repress the people, when before they did not listen, nor did they act, when faced with the demands of hundreds of residents of the autonomous municipality who requested food, the reinstallation of basic services, treatment for sick people, under the false argument that they were incapable of entering the zone and that they would not risk their people."

The government's preferential treatment of the paramilitaries is unmistakable: in addition to deploying armed state police to guard the UBISORT's blockade when the humanitarian caravan attempted to enter San Juan Copala this past June, the government has failed to act when members of the autonomous municipality have come under attack, presumably by government-aligned paramilitaries. Just this past July 26, Maria Rosa Francisco disappeared when her home in San Juan Copala came under fire. All of her animals were killed in the attack, and she remains missing and is feared dead. The Bartolomé Carrasco Briseño Human Rights Center publicly denounced the attack and called on its supporters to contact the government and demand that put an end to the violence.

The Human Rights Center's pleas were met with indifference in the government. However, as soon as a paramilitary's cadaver appeared in San Juan Copala, the government acted.

The autonomous municipality reports that it desperately needs money to pay for the wounded women's medical treatment and to buy phone credit in order to communicate with the press and human rights organizations.

The United States and Jamaica celebrated the capture of Christopher “Dudus” Coke on June 24 after a 30-day manhunt that killed at least 73 Jamaicans, the overwhelming majority of them civilians. However, the arrest of one man does not mean that Jamaica has eliminated organized crime from the island, or even dismantled Coke’s organization, the Shower Posse. The Shower Posse has already survived the loss of one leader: Lester Lloyd Coke, Dudus’ father and founder of the Shower Posse, died in 1992 under suspicions circumstances in prison.

The CBSI is, according to the Obama administration, a “multiyear, multifaceted effort by the U.S. Government and Caribbean partners to develop a joint regional citizen safety strategy to tackle the full range of security and criminal threats to the Caribbean Basin.” In many ways, it is similar to previous anti-drug efforts such as Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative.

In 2010, the first year of the CBSI, the US Congress dedicated $21.1 million (just under 50 percent of the total Initiative) to “social justice and education programs.” This funding will be split among fifteen recipient countries. However, in his FY2011 budget request, President Obama signals that the CBSI might suffer the same fate as the Mérida Initiative: development aid dwindles as more resources are dedicated to military and law enforcement solutions. In FY2011, Obama has requested $79 million for the CBSI, of which only $17 million is for economic and social assistance. This trend is likely to continue, as the CBSI will eventually include a US vessel being deployed to the Caribbean to “provide training, logistical and maintenance support.”

Plan Colombia, which also included US military deployment, but on a much larger scale, failed to achieve its stated goal of reducing drug cultivation and production in that country, according to a Government Accountability Office report.

The US government claims that “Developing [the CBSI] became a priority as the Merida Initiative began yielding positive results in Mexico and Central America, making the Caribbean an increasingly attractive transit zone for transnational organized criminals, terrorists and illicit traffickers.” Nonetheless, the US government’s own International Narcotics Control Strategy Report appears to contradict this claim: Mexico’s drug production has increased over the course of Mexico’s military-led drug war, while drug seizures and eradication are down. The percentage of US-bound cocaine that passes through Mexico has remained constant at 90 percent.

Over the course of Mexico’s Mérida Initiative-supported war on drugs, the homicide rate has increased at a record-breaking rate, nearly doubling every year. Since the end of 2006, over 22,700 people have been killed in Mexico’s drug war. With an estimated 1,200 executions, June 2010 was the deadliest month of President Calderón’s term to date. The prevailing theory for why violence has spiraled out of control in Mexico is that the drug war has disrupted normal drug trafficking patterns, leaving chaos in their place.

Jamaican media celebrated the fact that Jamaica’s five-per-day murder rate tapered off following the police and military raids in Kingston as they searched for Coke. However, the circumstances surrounding the deaths of the 73 people killed in the raids may never be known: Jamaica sent a donated international ballistics expert home, and multiple problems have plagued the autopsies, leading to some bodies being buried without an autopsy. Survivors of the siege report widespread abuses by security forces.

Mexico’s experience, particularly that of the “deadliest city in the world,” Ciudad Juarez, shows that violence does indeed drop immediately following significant police and military operations. However, these lulls have always been temporary, and violence picks up again as organized crime adjusts to its new working conditions.

Even before Jamaican authorities captured Coke, there were fears that violence would fill the gap left by the loss of the “Don” Jamaicans refer to as “the President” and “Robin Hood.” Some of Jamaica’s most popular musicians, such as Bunny Wailer, Cecile, Twins of Twins, Mavado, and Vybz Kartel, rallied around Coke with songs such as “Don’t Touch the President” and “Which Dudus.” They and other Jamaicans—particularly those from Coke’s stronghold in Tivoli Gardens—argue that “the President” filled a role that the Jamaican government doesn’t. He brokered peace deals between warring gangs, paid for children’s school supplies, gave money to people when they were out of work, and bought medicine for the elderly. Supporters and admirers have repeatedly cited Coke’s social contributions—not a propensity for violence—as the reason he was more influential than the government in Tivoli Gardens, one of Jamaica’s most troubled neighborhoods.

This means that if Jamaica and the United States want to keep the peace on the Caribbean island, they have some big shoes to fill: those of Christopher “Dudus” Coke, the “Robin Hood from the Neighborhood.” At first glance, the Caribbean Basin Security Initiative, with its focus on law enforcement, appears to fall short.

Friday, July 2, 2010

This is part of a longer article about San Juan Copala that won't be published before Oaxaca's state elections on July 4. I'm making this excerpt available here, because after this Sunday's elections, everything will change.

by Kristin Bricker

UPDATED JULY 5 to clarify UBISORT murder.

Violence in Oaxaca is increasing as state elections draw near. Nearly all of the opposition parties have formed an alliance against the ruling Institutional Revolution Party (PRI) and are backing one gubernatorial candidate, Gabino Cué. The PRI has ruled Oaxaca with an iron fist for the past eighty years.

While violence and elections always seem to go hand-in-hand in Oaxaca, the close race seems to be raising tensions to a boiling point. Section 22 of the teachers union, which lead the nonviolent uprising that nearly unseated Ruiz in 2006, remains on strike pending resolution of their contract negotiations with the state. Section 22 hasn't been on strike this long since 2006, when Ruiz attacked sleeping teachers and children in their protest encampment without warning, sparking the uprising. With Oaxaca's most important cultural and tourist event of the year, the Guelaguetza, following on the heels of the election, the state government has a lot of motivation to get the teachers off the streets...one way or another. On June 30 in Santo Domingo de Morelos, unidentified gunmen murdered the mayor and another high-ranking official. Both men were Section 22 teachers and members of the opposition Democratic Revolution Party (PRD).

Tensions are rising in the autonomous municipality of San Juan Copala as well, as the government debates whether or not it will send ballot boxes into the besieged area. Likewise, the autonomous municipality, which was formed with the goal of banishing political parties from the indigenous Triqui region, is debating whether or not it will allow the government to place the ballot boxes in the municipality. The Triquis who founded and support the autonomous municipality blame political parties for creating divisions within their communities. These divisions have lead to a situation in which much of the violence in the region is the result of Triquis killing other Triquis.

San Juan Copala declared itself autonomous following the 2006 nonviolent uprising that nearly drove out Oaxaca’s governor, Ulises Ruiz Ortiz. Founders of the autonomous municipality played an important role in the uprising as advisors to the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO), which coordinated the protests. The paramilitary organization Union for the Social Well-being of the Triqui Region (UBISORT), which was formed by the PRI in 1994 to keep the Zapatista uprising in the neighboring state of Chiapas from spilling over into Oaxaca.

In Copala, violent attacks appear to becoming more frequent as the elections draw near. Last week, snipers shot an eight-year-old girl and two women in San Juan Copala in two separate attacks. All three survived the shootings. On July 1, unidentified gunmen executed UBISORT leader* Severiano Flores.

* The Oaxacan media, which is very pro-government, claimed that Flores was an UBISORT leader. That same media, without providing a shred of proof, claimed that MULTI, the Triqui organization that is pushing for autonomy in the region, carried out the execution. Sources close to the autonomous municipality tell me that Flores wasn't an UBISORT leader. A member, yes, but a leader, no. He was murdered in a dispute that is unrelated to the fight over Triqui autonomy, and the UBISORT is only now claiming that he is a leader in order to blame the autonomous municipality of San Juan Copala. Who knows who is telling the truth, but that's the other side of the story.

Thursday, July 1, 2010

A shorter version of this article appears in the current issue of Left Turnmagazine, which is on newsstands now, or can be purchased online.

by Kristin Bricker

Anyone who saw the police strapping on protective gear on October 10, 2009, probably thought they were preparing to battle organized crime. That night, six thousand militarized federal police deployed to Mexico City and four surrounding states. But they weren’t there to take down a drug cartel. Their orders were to bust the Mexican Electrical Workers Union, the SME.

Without warning, the police stormed government-owned power plants and substations and ordered all of the workers out at gunpoint. No pink slip, just the barrel of a gun—and instantly 44,000 workers found themselves jobless. Another 16,000 retirees saw their pensions disappear overnight. In one hour, President Felipe Calderon fired every member of the SME, one of the nation’s oldest and most powerful unions.

The move sent chills down the spine of every union worker in the country. Guadalupe Cervantes from the San Luis Potosi Independent Union of State Government Workers asked, “If the government can do something like this to the SME, what will it do to the rest of the unions?”

Calderon told the press that the government would provide the electrical workers with “assistance and training to find other jobs.” The President conveniently forgot that Mexico is currently experiencing what is arguably the worst employment crisis in the nation’s history. Laid-off electricians will have to get in line behind the millions of people who are already unemployed or severely underemployed.

Rising Prices

As if the lack of gainful employment weren’t enough, prices of basic necessities have skyrocketed during Calderon’s term. Since Calderon took office on December 1, 2006, the price of the canasta básica (the government’s official measure of the cost of feeding a family of five for one day) has risen 93%.

The federal government owns Mexico’s petroleum industry, as decreed by the constitution. Calderon has repeatedly increased the price of gas throughout his term in order to make up for budget shortfalls caused by the global economic crisis and the drug war. Higher gas prices mean that the cost of transportation and petroleum-based chemical fertilizers also increase, which translate into higher food prices.

Food prices are also rising because successive Mexican presidents have led Mexico down a path of neo-liberal globalization. Government policies are intentionally converting Mexico’s traditional peasant agriculture, which produces food for auto-consumption and domestic consumption, into industrial agriculture that produces for the global market. Monoculture is replacing the milpas, a peasant farming method in which several crops are mixed together in a single field. Following Hurricanes Stan and Wilma, for example, the Chiapas government offered economic incentives to peasants who converted their destroyed milpas into African palm plantations.

Some peasants have stopped working in agriculture altogether. Former President Carlos Salinas’ reform of the Mexican Constitution’s Article 27 made it legal to sell ejidos (communal peasant land) and use them as collateral for loans. Prior to the reform, ejidos belonged to the community and could only be inherited. The reform of Article 27 was a prerequisite for Mexico’s entry into the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

NAFTA dealt a double blow to Mexico’s peasant farmers. It flooded Mexico with subsidized corn and other agricultural products from the United States, which destroyed the domestic market. Farmers, faced with cheap, imported, genetically modified competition, struggled to make ends meet. When they could no longer compete, they lost their land through sales and foreclosures, both made possible by the reform of Article 27.

The result is that Mexican farmland is no longer producing enough food for domestic consumption. It produces eucalyptus for wood pulp, African palm and soy for biofuels, and grain for livestock—all destined for the international market. In turn, Mexico is now dependent on imported food, regardless of what it might cost.

Thanks in large part to NAFTA, Mexico now sends approximately 80% of its exports to the United States. Exports constitute approximately 30% of Mexico’s gross domestic product (GDP). When the US economy crashed and its effects rippled across the globe, demand for Mexico’s exports dropped, causing its GDP to plunge 6.5% in 2009.

With the economy shrinking and the country in the middle of an expensive war, Calderon had to come up with money for the federal budget somehow. In 2009, while many federal social and development experienced budget cuts, drug war spending increased. In 2010, with the country experiencing a full-blown economic crisis, Calderon increased drug war funding yet again. This year he expects to add 12,347 drug warriors to the military, Federal Police, and intelligence agencies. He funded these new positions by laying off 10,000 civilian government workers.

In addition to massive layoffs, Calderon funded his 2010 budget by raising taxes. The new higher tax covers a range of goods and services, including all imported goods. The higher rate taxes prices that were already inflated due to years of neo-liberal economic restructuring.

Government Neglect

Valle de Chalco is a working class town located along a major highway just outside of Mexico City. Many residents either commute to work in Mexico City or make a living in the informal economy, working in the local flea market or in workshops located in their homes.

The town was already feeling the effects of the economic crisis: the rising cost of living, stagnant wages, and layoffs mean that customers have less money to spend. But then things got much worse.

This past February, the Mexico City metropolitan area experienced unseasonable rains during what is generally the dry season. It rained for a week, swelling local streams.

Valle de Chalco is located next to the La Compania canal, which used to be a river. As the government authorized and funded new housing projects upstream, the amount of runoff, raw sewage, and industrial waste that was dumped into the river steadily increased. About twenty years ago, in order to accommodate rising water levels, the government began to pile sandbags and dirt along the riverbanks, turning the polluted river into a makeshift black water canal.

“Any time you drive down that highway [next to the canal] you see a bulldozer putting more and more dirt around the canal,” says Chalco resident Aurura Garcia Ruiz.

The canal, despite its haphazard construction, is equipped with floodgates and sump pumps—both of which require electricity in order to function.

Blackouts

The SME had a team of electricians that worked around the clock to repair potentially dangerous electrical outages, such as those that effect sump pumps and floodgates. When Calderon shut down the government-owned company where they worked, Luz y Fuerza del Centro (LyFC), he promised the public that 8,000 people could do the work that 44,000 SME members used to do.

Calderon turned LyFC’s grid and infrastructure over to the other government-owned electric company, the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE). The union that represents CFE workers is a charro union—political parties control its leaders, and the union is pro-government and docile.

When the CFE took control of LyFC’s infrastructure, it subcontracted 200 workers to maintain the grid. The majority of those workers sleep in cots in a 10-meter by 20-meter tent that is reminiscent of an emergency storm shelter. The 200 workers share six cold-water showers and twelve latrines.

The SME's Secretary of the Interior, Humberto Montes de Oca, says the subcontractors are untrained and working under dangerous conditions. He says that many of them have been injured or killed on the job: he cited one man who was reportedly electrocuted and another who fell from a tower. "This is how the government wants to see all of us workers,” he said. “With miserable paychecks, in a tragic situation, without benefits, without a collective contract, and without a union."

Even with the help of 200 cheap, expendable subcontractors, it appears as though—contrary to what Calderon claims—8,000 CFE workers can’t maintain the grid that 44,000 SME members had maintained for over 100 years. Frequent and prolonged power outages have plagued the former LyFC grid ever since Calderon’s middle-of-the-night shotgun layoffs last October.

Unnatural Disaster

On February 3 and 4 during heavy unseasonable rains, the SME documented service interruptions that amounted to a “perfect storm” over the southern Mexico City metropolitan area. Four electrical substations that serve that area experienced “disturbances,” knocking out the power to southern Mexico City’s drain system, flood gates, and two sump pumps, one of which served the La Compania canal in Valle de Chalco.

The floodwaters began to rise in southern Mexico City as the rain filled the streets and rivers. With the sump pumps and floodgates inoperable, the water filled La Compania canal, pushing against its makeshift walls until they burst on February 5.

When the canal wall burst in front of Valle de Chalco, raw sewage and industrial runoff flooded the highway, killing five motorists.

“We blocked the street with sandbags,” recounts Luisa Lopez Santos. “We saw that the water reached a certain point and stopped rising, so we figured, 'Well, that's as high as it'll get, just like ten years ago.'”

However, when Valle de Chalco flooded ten years ago, the drainage system and sump pumps were operational.

“To our surprise,” says Lopez Santos, “the water started coming up out of the drains, the foundations of the houses, in the gardens...water started gushing out from everywhere.”

The SME documented electrical failures in the area throughout the week, which caused the floodwaters to retreat much slower than normal. Valle de Chalco was under raw sewage for thirteen days. In some areas, the dirty water filled houses’ entire first floors.

Chalco residents went at least 15 days without work. Many of those who commuted to Mexico City for work lost their jobs for failure to show. “People couldn't get to work,” says Garcia Ruiz. “The street was full of water and cars and buses."

Those who work in Chalco saw their livelihoods washed away along with their homes. Everyone is finding it difficult to pick up the pieces.

“We sell in the flea market, and our sales have dropped a lot,” says Lopez Santos. “People who before bought a half kilo of peppers are now buying a quarter kilo because they don't have work.”

Flood survivors criticize the government’s response to the flood. The government gave MX$20,000 ($1,640 USD) to each family affected by the flood, regardless of the damage sustained to their homes or how many people are in each family. Residents who lost their home-based businesses received no extra aid. Rather than disinfecting homes and helping families remove their belongings that had been soaking in raw sewage for over two weeks, teams of government workers merely pushed the “mud” out of houses with brooms and gave every family a bucket of paint and a bottle of bleach.

A government aid worker who spoke to Left Turn on condition of anonymity says that many families aren’t receiving the little aid they are entitled to: “A lot of property owners are taking advantage to collect the aid that is owed to their renters.”

Furthermore, the aid worker says, “We have to determine the number of families in a building by the number of kitchens.” Many poor Mexican families rent one room for their entire family and share a kitchen with other renters. This means that five poor families who rent rooms in a building with a shared kitchen split $20,000 in aid.

The $20,000 the government gave flood victims came in the form of vouchers that they could only use in select chain stores, making it impossible to shop around for the best price or buy used. This means that flood victims can’t stretch the $20,000 vouchers as far as they could stretch cash. “There's a lot of people who, when they got their vouchers and figured out that they could only use them to buy a few things, decided to wash their beds,” says Garcia Ruiz.

Chalco residents are feeling the consequences of sleeping on dirty beds in dirty houses. They have skin infections, respiratory infections, eye infections, sore throats, allergies, infected lesions: all the result of living in and breathing the filth and dust that the raw sewage left in their homes and neighborhoods. But the government’s medical teams came and left immediately following the flood, and they don’t plan to return. The government also never sent psychologists to help residents through shock and post-traumatic stress disorder.

The Coordinadora Valle de Chalco, a local coalition that is part of the Zapatistas’ Other Campaign, has stepped up to fill the gap left by the government’s criminal neglect. Through community work, they are proving that organized people can meet their own needs better than the government can.

On February 5, when the floodwaters first began to rise, the Coordinadora mobilized to help residents move their belongings to the second floor of their homes. They helped neighbors pile sandbags in the streets in an attempt to stop the floodwaters’ advance.

“We initially provided human labor for the most part,” explains Coordinadora member Rafael Garfias. “Later, donations of food and money began to arrive from the Other Campaign in Mexico City and Mexico State, so we started to distribute that as well. We started to videotape and take photos so that people on the outside would know what was happening here. Two days after the flooding, the government began to say that everything was under control, that people were fine, that no one should worry. So we began to issue communiqués about the military and police presence. There were no aid workers. They sent the military. The Navy. The police… this was their first response.”

When the floodwaters retreated, the Coordinadora organized an autonomous needs assessment to determine its response to the disaster. This set them apart from the political parties and factions who wanted to capitalize on the disaster. “Right now we’re not interesting in shutting down highways or occupying the town hall,” argues Garfias. “The Other Campaign’s slogan, ‘From below and to the left,’ is not empty rhetoric. It means that if the government doesn’t care about us, we have an urgent task at hand. We need to help our people get through the shock, be there with them. If they decide to shut down a road, we’ll be there with them. But we asked, ‘What do you want? What do you need? How can we help?’ And they told us, ‘We need medical attention. We need for the kids to get past their trauma.’”

So, instead of a protest, the Coordinadora organized a fair in the church. Church ladies distributed donated food and clothing while doctors from the Other Campaign provided free exams and medicine. A hairdresser donated her labor and cut kids’ hair while musicians sang. Psychologists from the Other Campaign will visit the community soon.

“The path is clear: from below and to the left,” says Garfias. “What’s important now is the community work that will give us the strength to begin bigger projects and keep organizing."